The disclosure relates to a method for operating a bus system, in which a plurality of subscribers communicate with one another over the same bus line and all subscribers are assigned a subscriber address from a limited address set. To avoid address conflicts, it is suggested that by each subscriber newly added to an existing bus system, the bus traffic will be monitored before the first send access to the bus with the current subscriber address, in order to form a list of already used subscriber addresses. The subscriber then assigns itself an address from the as yet unused address space according to a predefinable schema.